Search form

You are here

Assessment

AIR’s work includes formative, summative, diagnostic, and international assessment, and is used to measure student or system performance.

AIR offers a full range of assessment services, collaborating with our state and district clients, to develop and deploy customized, criterion-referenced assessment programs to help students learn, teachers teach, and parents know what is happening at school. It is also used for accountability at the school or district level.

AIR also plays a strong role in shaping education assessment and evaluation in developing countries.

Our evaluation work involves carefully collecting information about a project or program in order to assess effectiveness and make decisions.

State achievement standards represent how much the state expects their students to learn in order to reach various levels of academic proficiency. This report uses national benchmarking as a common metric to examine state achievement standards and compare how high these standards are compared to the National Assessment of Educational Progress achievement levels.

What students are expected to learn in some states can vary greatly with what students are expected to learn in other states. This AIR study uses international benchmarking as a common metric to examine the variance in state performance standards, exposing a large gap in expectations between the states with the highest standards and the states with the lowest standards.

We have no common metric to compare the learning outcomes of colleges and universities and no data to show if students graduating from college can read better than when they finished high school. We also have no data on whether going to an Ivy League school results in higher levels of learning than going to a state-supported school.

This linking study shows that NAEP Grade 4 reading achievement levels are higher than the PIRLS international benchmarks, providing one piece of validity evidence that NAEP results are internationally competitive.